Muslims in China Tarred with Bin Laden's Brush

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Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 06:11:54 -0800

Muslims in China Tarred with bin Laden's brush
Mar 28th 2002 | KASHGAR, KHOTAN AND URUMQI
September 11th gave China a handy excuse to repress its
discontented Muslim minority in Xinjiang. Not that it
really needed one.
The dust-blown towns and villages on the southern edge
of the Taklamakan desert form the front line of what
China calls its own campaign against international
terrorism. These ancient Silk Road oases, says its
propaganda machine, harbour Muslim extremists intent on
overthrowing Chinese rule with the backing of Osama bin
Laden's terrorist network. That, at any rate, is the
official version. Far more plausible, though, is that
China is invoking Mr bin Laden's name to justify tight
control over its Turkic-speaking Muslims, especially
the Uighurs who dominate this part of the Xinjiang
?autonomous? region in China's far west.
In one town, a Uighur worker at a mosque waits for the
prayer hall to empty before regaling foreign visitors
with his grievances. ?We want to build our own
country, but there's no way. If we try, we are
immediately arrested and executed,? he says. Such
sentiments are echoed by many Uighurs, whose Islamic
culture has far more in common with that of the
formerly Soviet Central Asian republics than with the
rest of China. Some say that Chinese officials have
clamped down even harder since the September 11th
terrorist attacks in America, targeting religious
activities in particular.
In a report published last week, the human-rights group
Amnesty International gave details of what it said was
an intensifying campaign against suspected government
opponents in Xinjiang. It quoted Uighur exiles as
saying that some 3,000 people were detained in the
crackdown between mid-September and the end of last
year. Some have been sentenced to death and executed
after summary trials.
This does not necessarily indicate that China has
greatly widened its net since September 11th. By
Amnesty's calculation, tens of thousands of Uighurs
have been rounded up in the last decade, and as early
as April last year, China launched a nationwide
?strike hard? campaign against serious crime, which
in Xinjiang also targeted the ?three evils? of
separatism, terrorism and religious extremism. Well
before September 11th, the authorities were closing
down unauthorised mosques and forcing imams to go to
political-indoctrination classes. Mr bin Laden provides
no more than a convenient excuse?and a belated one at
that?for a continuing campaign of repression in
Xinjiang.
On the surface, Kashgar and Khotan?the two best-known
hotbeds of Uighur nationalism in southern Xinjiang?
still appear relaxed. Apart from slogans condemning
separatism draped over the entrances of many schools
and other government-run institutions, there is little
public evidence of the clampdown. Your correspondent
drove the 300-odd miles between Kashgar and Khotan
without being stopped for any identity check and saw no
special security measures in either town or places in
between.
The authorities' low profile is in fact rather curious
given China's claim in January that it had arrested
more than 100 ?terrorists? who had ?sneaked into
Xinjiang? after receiving training in Afghanistan and
elsewhere. A government report said such terrorists had
been conducting bombings in department stores, markets
and other public places, as well as murdering officials
and Uighur imams appointed by the Chinese government.
China says terrorists fighting for an independent
?East Turkestan??the name of two short-lived
independent Uighur republics, set up in 1933 and 1944?
have carried out more than 200 attacks in Xinjiang
since 1990.Yet the most recent explosion blamed on
terrorists in the region occurred in 1998. Western
diplomats dispute China's claims of complicity in such
violence by overseas terrorist groups. Although several
hundred Uighurs joined the Taliban in Afghanistan,
?there is no evidence of any link between the Uighurs
and al-Qaeda,? says a diplomat familiar with the
region.
China's portrayal of Uighur separatism as a part of a
global terror problem is being seized upon by officials
in some parts of Xinjiang to harass the Muslim
population. In a village near Kashgar, a Uighur peasant
says that he now dares not complain about excessive
taxes imposed by the local authorities for fear of
being labelled a separatist. A Uighur taxi driver in
Khotan says his superiors have begun using the
separatist brush to tar anyone who complains about
working conditions.
In the Khotan region, the authorities worry about the
popularity of the conservative Wahhabi brand of Islam
to which al-Qaeda subscribes. ?You can't say in public
that you support the Wahhabi. Officials think it is
anti-government,? says a resident who describes
himself as a Wahhabi supporter. But in most parts of
Xinjiang, and even in Khotan, Islam is as much if not
more a badge of cultural identity than it is a
religious conviction. A western diplomat describes the
Wahhabism of Khotan as ?a protest theology? and says
that many ?Wahhabis? have little idea what that
really means. Most Muslims in Xinjiang practise the
mystical?and far more liberal?Sufi form of Islam,
which Wahhabis oppose. Some women who wear veils also
wear mini-skirts. The puritanism of the Taliban
movement would have little market here. One of the very
few examples of Uighur interest in pan-Islamic causes
was the uncovering by police last June of two cells of
Hizb-ut Tahrir, a group seeking to establish an Islamic
caliphate in Central Asia.
Many Uighurs, like Muslims elsewhere, are opposed to
the military campaign in Afghanistan. Yet they are also
grateful for what they see as American sympathy for the
Uighurs' plight. Asked who Uighurs regard as the leader
of their cause, a 25-year-old trader in the provincial
capital, Urumqi, said ?the only leader we have is
Radio Free Asia?, which is funded by Congress. In its
annual human-rights report on China published this
month, the American State Department said many Uighurs
had been detained for listening to the station, which
the Chinese try to jam.
Some Uighurs say their region is even more tightly
controlled by China than neighbouring Tibet. Such
resentment shows no sign of abating as China pumps more
money into the region as part of a strategy adopted in
1999 of encouraging investment in less developed
western parts of the country. The perception of many
Uighurs is that ethnic Han immigrants, who form some
40% of the region's 18m people (up from a mere 6% in
1949) are profiting most from the money. Should Hans
and Uighurs become even more polarised, this could
spawn exactly the kind of extremism that China most
fears.
2002 The Economist Newspaper and The
Economist Group.
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